My contacts with the old rogue went back thirty years. Danny and I first met back in the sixties, the days of National Service, in the Air Force at a desolate camp on Salisbury Plain called Netheravon, and even so early in his career, still in his teens, Danny had got life running the way he wanted. He’d formed a poker school with a scale of duties as the stakes and, so far as I know, served his two years without ever polishing a floor, raking out a stove or doing a guard duty. No one ever caught him cheating, but his silky handling of the cards should have taught anyone not to play with him. He seduced (an old-fashioned word that gives a flavour of the time) the only WRAF officer on the roll and had the use of her pale blue Morris Minor on Saturdays to support his favourite football team, Bristol Rovers. Weekend passes were no problem. You had to smile at Danny.
I came across him again twelve years later, in 1973, on the sea front at Brighton dressed in a striped blazer, white flannels and a straw hat and doing a soft-shoe dance to an old Fred Astaire number on an ancient wind-up gramophone with a huge brass horn. I had no idea Danny was such a beautiful mover. So many people had stopped to watch that you couldn’t get past without walking on the shingle. It was a deeply serious performance that refused to be serious at all. At a tempo so slow that any awkwardness would have been obvious, he shuffled and glided and turned about, tossing in casual gull-turns and toe-taps, dipping, swaying and twisting with the beat, his arms windmilling one second, seesawing the next, and never suggesting strain. After he’d passed the hat around, we went for a drink and talked about old times and former comrades. I paid, of course. After that we promised to stay in touch. We met a few times. I went to his second wedding in 1988 — a big affair, because Merle had a sister and five brothers, all with families. They were a crazy bunch. The reception, on a river steamer, was a riot. I’ve never laughed so much.
Danny was fifty-seven when he died.
We sang another hymn and the curate said a prayer and led us out for the Committal. The pall-bearers hoisted the coffin and brought it along the aisle. I didn’t need the nudge I got from my companion as they passed. I could see for myself that the wood was a cheap veneer. I wasn’t judgmental. Quite possibly Danny had left Merle with nothing except his antique gramophone and some debts.
“She had him insured for a hundred and fifty K,” Mean-mouth insisted on telling me as we followed the coffin along a path between the graves. “She could have given him a decent send-off.”
I told him curtly that I wasn’t interested. God knows, I was trying not to be. At the graveside, I stepped away from him and took a position opposite. Let him bend someone else’s ear with his malice.
Young sheep were bleating in the field beside the churchyard as the coffin was lowered. The clouds parted and we felt warmth on our skins. I remembered Danny dancing on the front that summer evening at Brighton. Bon voyage, old buccaneer, I thought. You robbed all of us of something, some time, but we came in numbers to see you off. You left us glittering memories, and that wasn’t a bad exchange.
A few tears were shed around that grave.
As the Grace was spoken I became conscious of those joyless eyes sizing me up for another approach, so I gave him one back, raised my chin to the required level and stared like one of those stone figures on Easter Island. My twenty years of teaching fifteen-year-olds haven’t been totally wasted. Then I turned away, said “Amen,” and smiled benignly at the curate.
Mean-mouth walked directly through the lych-gate, got into his car and drove off. Why do people like that bother to come to funerals?
Most of us converged on the Red Lion across the street. A pub lunch. A corrective to nostalgia. It fitted my picture of Danny that his mourners should be forced to dip into their pockets to buy their own drinks. The only food on offer was microwaved meat pies with soggy crusts. Mean-mouth must have known. He would have told me that Merle was the skinflint, and on sober reflection it is difficult to believe otherwise. It seemed Danny had ended up with a tightwad wife. A nice irony.
And the family weren’t partying at the house. They joined us, Merle leading them in while “Happy Days Are Here Again” came over the music system. Her choice of clothes left no one in any doubt that she was the principal lady in the party — a black cashmere coat and a matching hat with a vast brim like a manta that flapped as she moved. She was a good ten years younger than Danny, a tall, triumphantly slim, talkative woman who chain-smoked. I’d heard that she knew a lot about antiques; at their wedding, Danny had got in first with the obvious joke about his antiquity, and frankly the way Merle had eyed him all through the reception, you’d have thought he was a piece of Wedgwood. Yet we all knew he was out of the reject basket. Slightly chipped. Well, extensively, to be truthful. He’d lived the kind of free-ranging life he’d wanted, busking, bar-tending, running a stall at a fairground, a bit of chauffeuring, leading guided walks around the East End and for a time acting as a croupier. Enjoyable, undemanding jobs on the fringe of the entertainment industry, but never likely to earn much of a bank balance. With his innocent-looking eyes and deep-etched laughter lines, he had a well-known attraction for women that must have played a part in the romance, but Merle didn’t look the sort to go starry-eyed into marriage.
Someone bought her a cocktail in a tall glass and she began the rounds of the funeral party, cigarette in one hand, drink in the other, giving and receiving kisses. The mood of forced bonhomie that gets people through funerals was well established. I overheard one formidably fat woman telling Merle, “Never mind love, you’re not bad-looking. Keep your ’air nice and you’ll be all right. Won’t ’appen at once, mind. I ’ad to wait four years. But you’ll be all right.”
Merle’s hat quivered.
She moved towards me and I gave her the obligatory kiss and muttered sympathetic words. She said, “Good of you to come. We never really got to know each other, did we? You and Danny go back a long way.”
“To his Air Force days,” I said.
“Oh, he used to tell wonderful tales of the RAF,” she said, calling it the ‘raff’ and clasping my hand so firmly that I could feel every one of her rings. “I don’t know if half of them are true. The night exercises.”
“Night exercises at Netheravon?” said I, not remembering any.
She took hold of my hand and squeezed it. “Come on, you know Danny. That was his name for that pilot officer whose car he used.”
“Oh, her.”
“Night exercises. Wicked man.” She chuckled. “I couldn’t be jealous when he put it like that. To Danny, she was just an easy lay. I envy you, knowing him when he was young. He must have been a right tearaway. Anyway, sweetie, I’d better not gossip. So many old mates to see.” She moved on, leaving me in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Another woman holding a gin and tonic sidled close and said, “What’s she on, do you think? She’s frisky for a widow.”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Danny’s brother Ben must have given her some pills.”
“Which one is Ben?”
“In the blue suit and black polo neck. Handy having a doctor for your brother-in-law.”
“Yes.” I glanced across at brother-in-law Ben, a taller, slimmer version of Danny. “He looks young.”
“Fourteen years younger than Danny. They were step-brothers, I think.”
On an impulse I asked, “Was he Danny’s doctor also?”